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This paper argues that Aristotelian practical wisdom (phronēsis) is a state of conviction (pistis) in the goodness of our goals based on proper grounds. This state of conviction can only be achieved if rational arguments and principles agree with how things appear to us. Since, for Aristotle, passions influence appearances, they can support or undermine our conviction in the goodness of ends. For this reason, we cannot be practically wise without virtuous dispositions to experience appropriate passions. Along the way, I argue that this reading allows us to explain the shortcomings of self‐controlled and akratic agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper discusses the anthropology, ethics, and politics of Helvetius, focusing on the theme of power and the passions that gravitate around it, and highlighting the transition from a position that could be broadly defined as "anarchic" (all powers are bad) to one that realistically takes power for granted as an insurmountable horizon (and which leads to the future-laden idea of a "democratic despotism"). By analyzing these themes, it questions the common interpretation of Helvetius's thought as a compact block ("Le système d'Helvétius"), emphasizing the way in which the theoretical reworkings presented in De l'homme must be understood in light of the internal tensions of De l'esprit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the first half of Part 5 of the Ethics, Spinoza presents his directions for mitigating the passions through reason. He touts his account of the power of reason over the passions as ground-breaking and unique, while positioning himself squarely within the traditional debate of akrasia, or weakness of will. Spinoza claims he is the first to identify the affects through their characteristic effects, and demonstrate the way these effects can be countered by the mind's activity. It follows that Spinoza's claim for originality can be explained in (at least) two ways: first, passions themselves have been misunderstood, and second, previous philosophers have misunderstood the relationship between reason and the passions. In the first part of this paper, I place Spinoza's discussion of the passions and reason's power over them in a historical context. Next, I present Spinoza's definition of the affects, and his directions for 'destroying' the passions. In the third section I point to the differences between my interpretation and that of recent commentators. Finally, I discuss the way in which Spinoza's directions for mitigating the passions serve as the psychological basis for his moral theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Descartes' theory of the passions has important connections to his view that nonhuman animals are automata. In this paper, I show how critics of animal automatism exploited these connections. I interpret a criticism of animal automatism developed by Gabriel Daniel (1649–1728). Daniel argues that animal automatism commits Descartes to an implausible account of the phenomenology of conflicts between passion and reason. If animal bodies act by mere automatic mechanism, then when a human being resists their animal impulses they should experience a conflict between the disposition of their body and their rational soul. However, our experience of conflicts between passion and reason instead suggests that these conflicts are internal to the soul. Daniel's objection to Cartesian animal automatism was later criticized by David Renaud Boullier (1699–1759), but Boullier himself raises an objection to Cartesian animal automatism that develops insights from Daniel. I argue that Boullier succeeds in raising a powerful objection to Cartesian animal automatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By turning his focus to individuals – the profile of billionaires as the people they are – Peter Hägel offers in his book Billionaires in World Politics an interesting move towards agency, showing that their power, even if situated in a complex economic structure, also consists in bending, changing, or setting the rules of how the game is played. After having followed the move of the pendulum from structure to agency with Hägel, in this paper I suggest that moving back to structural analyses could again provide new insights. I argue that in order to have a more complete picture of the billionaires-and-politics puzzle, it is required to not only look at agency as a kind of reflexive phenomenon, but also to provide a more historically informed genealogy of the conditions under which billionaires' passions have been shaped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Descartes, the passion of generosity—defined as legitimate self-esteem— appears to be egocentric, the result of agents' contemplation of their nature. Yet Cartesian generosity is also intended to serve as the foundation for other-regarding passions, attitudes, and dispositions. This paper examines this tension as it is addressed in the writings of an early Cartesian feminist, Mary Astell. We uncover the social dimension of generosity in Descartes's Passions of the Soul and demonstrate how Astell extends the Cartesian concept in her Serious Proposal. We argue that while there is an internal relationship between Cartesian generosity and good will toward others, Astell's work recognizes that generosity can only be fully actualized under equitable social conditions. We thus provide a deeper analysis of the role that this master passion plays in Descartes's ethical thought as well as a greater appreciation of the impact of Cartesian ethics on early modern feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to contribute to the discussion of Hume's theory of personal identity, by examining a conflict regarding the vivacity of the self in his writings about sympathy. Although the mechanism of sympathy supposes that self is the liveliest perception of thought, when we consider sympathy through the perspective of the 'desire of company', we find that self lacks vivacity and, without alterity, it would be in reality nothing. Our objective is to present the conflict and show that, far from being a contradiction in Hume's thinking, it is consistent with how the philosopher conceives personal identity as a product of imagination, that is, a perception that, like any other, exists within the flow of perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adam and Eve served their passion of gastrimargy and their ambition to become gods without the grace of God. The result was their exile from Paradise and death. The incarnation of Logos, His crucifixion, His death on the cross and His resurrection gave a second chance of man's salvation. Unfortunately, people do not put into practice this gift of their reconciliation to God. In this paper, we will compare the opinion of two important Church Fathers, Isidore of Pelusium and Theodore Stoudite. It is important to underline for what kind of passions these Church Fathers speak. Do they relate the passions only with monks or general with Christians? How can we get rid of a passion? Can their teaching be put into practice in nowadays? Which is the worst passion according to them? Are diseases and pandemic a punishment of God for our sins? Of course, we should explain that the passions in the life of a Christian can be proved deadly but they have no connection with the view that diseases are punishments from God for our passions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hume appeals to a mysterious mental process to explain how to world appears to possess features that are not present in sense perceptions, namely causal, moral, and aesthetic properties. He famously writes that the mind spreads itself onto the external world, and that we stain or gild natural objects with our sentiments. Projectivism is founded on these texts but it assumes a reading of Hume's language as merely metaphorical. This assumption, however, conflicts sharply with the important explanatory role that "spreading" and "staining" are supposed to play, which, ironically, is the very appeal of Hume's texts to projectivists. In this paper, I first consider the difficulties readers of Hume have encountered in their attempts to ascertain nature of the key psychological process. I then identify in Hume's texts novel theoretical resources that allow Hume to produce a satisfying answer to the question of process, that is, an account of the precise nature of the key process. I offer this explanation assuming what I take to be Hume's austere conception of the elements involved in the process: sense impressions and "internal impressions" lacking intrinsic intentionality. On my reading, the spreading process explains the gap between the meager input and the rich, novel output: causal, moral and aesthetic judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about Peter Hall, documenting and commenting on how Peter's contemporaries, be they peers, colleagues, friends or students, or even the older generation of the statistical community, perceived Peter, in their own words. To some extent, I also do the same with Peter's own perceptions and thoughts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focused upon Descartes' writings and letters, this paper considers the exponentially-charged relationship between sadness, melancholy, doubt and philosophical inquiry. The first sections examine the relation between sadness in the Cartesian corpus and melancholy as a traditional pathological classification, with both set against a larger seventeenth century intellectual discourse. The letters exchanged between the Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and the Palatine and Descartes between 1643 and 1649, that is, just prior to the death of the philosopher in 1650, reveal the central paradigm of this particular relationship between sadness and melancholy. The call to use philosophy as a cure against sadness also enters consideration, with the theatrical, artificial nature of the philosophical cure presented as essential not only to Descartes' relation to sadness, but also to philosophical method in general. The moral aspect of the establishment of mental habits and their emendation by philosophy hence yields central insights into the larger Cartesian project, here viewed as essentially premised upon a medical vocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A revisionary reading of Descartes's epistemology has emerged in the literature. Some commentators have argued that Descartes subscribes to passionate epistemology, which claims that epistemic progress in the Meditations requires contributions from the meditator's passions. This paper argues that the passions cannot perform any epistemic work in the Meditations. As such, the meditator's passions do not require us to revise our canonical understanding of the Meditations as an exercise of pure thought. Furthermore, we need not abandon the standard claim that ethical practice emerges in the tree of philosophy only after metaphysics and epistemology have been established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Descartes's vision on how the dimensions of the organism connect with each other. Re-reading Descartes is proposed as an antidote against endemic cultural dualism, in a world in which medical institutions, still describe human beings using dualistic terms such as 'psychosomatic', 'body psychotherapy', or 'body-mind' systems. It also introduces Descartes as an early scientific medical researcher who developed a scientific interactionist and organismic approach of embodiment. This paper is framed by my interest in the development of an 'organismic psychology', which assumes that physiological, behavioural, and psychological routines are embedded heterogeneous cogwheels of a human being. I have observed that such an approach is particularly useful with psychosomatic patients, and most forms of body psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper challenges the notion that Galenic humouralism stripped the early modern body of agency and argues that some accounts of early modern materialism were connected to epistemology. It evidences how Milton's passions are inscribed with the shocking language of agency and moral responsibility to overturn the assumption of "passive", unconscious passions. It explores two pictures of passions in connection with knowledge: passions as obstacles to knowledge, and passions as sources as knowledge. Both images recast the material body as a knowing agent, but do so with complications. Agency-ridden passions complicate a straightforward notion of agency, and seem to leave early moderns with the option of blaming their passions instead of themselves for deception. Frequent references to internal passions in political discourses also suggests an unsettling degree of comfort with subjectivity in making knowledge-statements, but it is a version of subjectivity that seems far more public than private. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The purpose of this paper is to bring into conversation the understanding of anger in the writings of the Evagrian tradition and the school of John Cassian, on the one hand, and the Mahāyāna discourse on anger that is exemplified in the writings of Śāntideva, on the other hand. Evagrios's and Cassian's reflection on emotions and their role in the monastic life are grounded in the Philokalic tradition of Eastern Christianity, while also drawing on the Stoic understanding of the inner life and the Neo-Platonic tripartite notion of the self as comprising a higher nous (intellect) and a lower set of passions bridging the gap between the mind and the body. The Mahāyāna understanding of the emotions, for its part, is geared toward the achievement of active nirvāna , where practitioners can finally discern the fundamental identity between the samsaric and the nirvanic character of our attachments. This paper will uncover a variety of points of contacts between the two traditions, both of which envisage anger as an obstacle preventing communion with God or the achievement of liberation. At the same time, this reading of texts from the two traditions will also highlight their irreducible differences, as well as their distinctive understanding of subjectivity, soteriology, and ultimate reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that Samuel Pufendorf's works on natural law contain a sentimentalist theory of morality that is Smithian in its moral psychology. Pufendorf's account of how ordinary people make moral judgements and come to act sociably is surprisingly similar to Smith's. Both thinkers maintain that the human desire for esteem, manifested by resentment and gratitude, informs people of the content of central moral norms and can motivate them to act accordingly. Finally, we suggest that given Pufendorf's theory of socially imposed moral entities, he has all the resources for a sentimentalist theory of morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pursues the central thesis that the construction of the eighteenth-century spectator of tragedy as passive opens the self to a radical experience of otherness and a compassionate relationship to the public sphere. The paper examines two related arguments: first, that eighteenth-century tragedy and aesthetic autonomy are related, and that the persistent dismissal of eighteenth-century tragedy as effete and its audiences as complacently bourgeois might be overturned by another look at Adorno's ambivalent definition of aesthetic autonomy; second, that the tragedy of the early eighteenth century develops a special relationship to passivity, both onstage and in its characterisation of its own spectators, and that this passivity is understood to be a comment on tragic form. I conclude that passivity has a specific contemplative moral value in the early eighteenth century, and that its value is incorporated into ethical concepts of aesthetic apprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is about the problematic interface between evolutionary scientists’ talk about ethics and current work in philosophy and theology. The paper proceeds by taking four main figures from four different disciplines. The four disciplines are neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, primatology and game theory, and the four figures are Joshua Greene, Mark Hauser, Frans de Waal and Ken Binmore. The paper relates the views of each of these figures to recent work in philosophical and theological ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the accounts of self-cultivation and self-denial of Archibald Campbell (1691-1756). It analyses how he attempts to make room for moral self-improvement and for the control of the passions in a thoroughly egoistic psychological framework, and with a theory of moral motivation that focuses on a specific kind of self-love, namely the desire for esteem. Campbell's views are analysed in the context of his criticisms of both Francis Hutcheson's benevolence-based moral philosophy and of Bernard Mandeville's version of an egoistic psychology. The paper explores the key role of Campbell's distinction between true and mistaken self-love, and it discusses how his account of self-cultivation reflects both his optimistic view of human nature as being naturally disposed to virtue and his moral rehabilitation of self-love - two points on which he is in conflict with the period's orthodox Calvinism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The passions of spectators have played a vital role in the transformation of games like baseball, Association football, and Australian Rules football into strikingly powerful institutions of popular culture, yet these spectators have largely remained on the margins of sports history. One reason for this has been the difficulty in tracing the various terms and phrases used to describe spectator cultures through the print archive of one sport, let alone comparing this with sports in other countries. This paper explores the way the increasing digitization of newspapers, journals, magazines, and other textual sources allows for the beginning of what might be termed a cultural history 2.0 of sports spectators and sports history more generally. Drawing on three digital archives, it begins the process of tracing the uses and meanings associated with the terms "cranks" and "barrackers" and the phrase "football fever" that were deployed to describe and represent the zealous spectator cultures that emerged around baseball in the United States, Australian Rules football in Australia, and Association football in the United Kingdom in the late 1800s. The digitized sources compared in this paper suggest the bodies of fans, as well as athletes, played a key role in the development of modern spectator sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fact of the multi-dimensionality of semiotics is an issue that offers more possibilities: either seen in the sense of their precise foreseeing, providing for, or discussing a scientific phenomenon, or otherwise, seen in the shape of its multiple formations, such as in the case of overcoming its rules. My aim in this paper is to make an attempt at proposing an hypothesis that may be overcoming another one, thus expressing ambiguity instead of precision, a metaphor instead a mono-semantic lexeme, or a complex instead of a simple phenomenon (thus, naming the different semiotic realities). This can be performed by representing at least some of the approaches to semiotics as a discipline: either seeing it as an expression of clearing redundancies through oppositions, through processes of representation, or through life processes. Starting from language-based semiotics, through scholars like Saussure and Jakobson, as well as through the Greimasian and Peirceian schools of semiotics, I have tried to exemplify what I have called semiotics of precision, on one hand, and what I have called a semiotics of imprecision, on the other. In the frames of such an exemplifying of these two approaches, I have tried to focus on the dichotomy between seeming and reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Charleton is an often-overlooked figure in the history of seventeenth-century philosophy, frequently thought of as a mere conduit for the ideas of others, rather than a significant thinker in his own right. As a self-described "eclectic," Charleton saw himself as avoiding dogmatism by selecting the best ideas from his sources and fitting them together into a new, coherent system. Here I argue his method allowed him to innovate on his sources, and led to attempts at overcoming the limitations of the systems he drew on. My focus is Charleton's Natural History of the Passions (1674) and what it takes from René Descartes's Passions of the Soul (1650). There are two benefits to this analysis. First, it will help contextualise Charleton's work and defend him against the accusation of lacking originality. Second, it will further our understanding of a hitherto understudied facet of Descartes's influence in early modern England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The works of Anne Finch, a writer doubly exiled as a female poet and Jacobite, stand out as eminently teachable examples of a compelling political outsider view that provokes us to consider how we can better attend to perspectives of principled opposition. Her poems in response to what has been called the "first modern revolution," together with her odes upon the deaths of King James II and Queen Mary Beatrice, showcase the subversive power of indirect articulation, expressing values through emotions and affects in veiled forms such as allegory and alternate history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commentators have sometimes underappreciated or misunderstood the point of Hume's theory of the passions. This paper offers an overview of the literature on Hume's psychology of the passions, with the aim of showing that it is not simply another mechanistic analysis alongside the offerings of Malebranche, Hobbes, and Spinoza. Recent discussions reveal that Hume's theory makes an influential contribution to the eighteenth-century debate on the importance of certain passions in human well-being, offers a conception of a social rather than a solitary self, and, among other things, has important implications for moral and motivational theory. This essay begins with the background to and the details of Hume's theory, with reference to contemporary interpretive treatments of Hume's taxonomy of the passions. It then considers specific questions to which Hume's theory of the passions has given rise, and appraises the various perspectives offered in response. Last, it considers broad interpretations concerning the import of Hume's theory of the passions on the whole: that the passions are crucial to morality; that the passions offer a solution to the problem of the self; that the passions are key to sociability and self-regulation; and that the passions play a fundamental role in religion and in the appreciation of tragedy. Throughout, this essay also notes topics on which more scholarly discussion would be especially beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I seek to show in what manner the Stoic principle of total blending, illustrated by the example of the penetration of fire into iron, finds its refraction in Byzantine Christological teachings. According to the Stoics, total blending occurs when one body accepts certain qualities of the other, while remaining itself, or when both mixed bodies acquire qualities of each other while preserving their natures. I argue that Origen's use of the example of incandescent iron had an effect on the later theological discourse. There it appears in two contexts, Christology and deification. In this article the focus is on Christology. I claim that the example was introduced into the Christological discourse by Apollinarius of Laodicea. Then, I investigate how it was transformed in later theological writings by (Ps.-) Basil of Caesarea, Theodoret of Cyrus, Cyril of Alexandria, Sever of Antioch, John of Damascus, and the Corpus Leontianum. In this context, I pay special attention to the discrepancy between John of Damascus and Leontius of Jerusalem as regards the issue of the complexity of Christ's hypostasis. I clarify the causes of this discrepancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argues that reason does not motivate action but rather directs our judgement by informing us about their causes and effects. He distances, in his argument, passions from reason by claiming that passions are not ideas, do not represent anything, are self-contained and thus cannot be contradictory to truth or reason. Moral judgements, according to Hume, are passions and as such they cannot be contrary to reason. For Hume, morality does not consist of immutable principles to be discovered by reason; it is based on human passions, which, through repetition, human beings come to associate with certain moral characteristics. Following on this statement, I here explore the following point: to the extent economic behaviour is determined by passions such as greed, benevolence and pleasure, we cannot separate economic activity and morality. As an extension, morality and political economy are inextricably linked in Hume. This suggests that ethics, through the study of morality and political economy, and the study of economic behaviour and institutions are inseparable subjects. It is interesting to observe this in the work of Hume, a fundamental influence on Adam Smith, one of the most important precursors of modern economics. The paper underlines the importance of understanding the evolution of the history of economic thinking that led to modern-day economics and which, though claiming Hume via Smith as one of its progenitors, argues for a complete separation of ethics and economics. In particular, the separation of positive from normative economics becomes infeasible in light of Hume’s analysis, rendering problematic the claim of modern economics that Hume is the founding father. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Bernard Mandeville's (1670-1733) conception of governability. It grounds his key distinction between a submissive and a governable subject in terms of his alternative account of human sociability to demonstrate the nature and structure of relationships that are necessary for upholding stable and flourishing societies. Using Sir William Temple as an interlocutor (1628-1699), it also explores the role played by the cultivation of reverence to authority in Mandeville's analysis of governability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to Sanem Soyarslan’s objections to my reading of Spinoza’s free person (homo liber). She argues that on my interpretation the free person, unlike the wise person (vir sapiens), while subject to passive affects, does not experience bondage to the passions; and so only the latter, but not the former, can serve as a viable “model of human nature.” I argue that, in fact, the free person and the wise person are, for Spinoza, one and the same indiviual, and thus constitute a single ideal model that we can more or less closely approximate.

Beginning with passions invoked by songs ‘You and Me’ and ‘Ode to the Motherland’, in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, this paper examines sports institutions via their structures of feeling, passions connected to their reasons. War and peace and nation and state tend to dominate study of politics of sport. But here we find cities in longstanding, elective public–private partnership with professional team sports because the teams provide spectators quest for excitement, safe intensity they pursue enthusiastically. Contrast with the management motives romanticised in Moneyball enables us to see this remarkable form of desire in Katie Casey, the fictional heroine of the vaudeville classic, ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’. While the elective anthem of the English, ‘Jerusalem’, reveals distinct passions – connected more closely to muscular Christianity and its moral imperialism – ‘Take Me Out’ suggests, as do close studies of spectators in Japan, China and elsewhere in East Asia, that a quiet politics of safe intensities vies with official efforts in China and elsewhere to enlist sport into patriotic triumphalisms. The virtual contest between Olympism and professional team sports is thus another tension line along which the future of China and East Asia is being fashioned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Commentators commonly assume that Descartes regards it as a function of the passions to inform us or teach us which things are beneficial and which are harmful. As a result, they tend to infer that Descartes regards the passions as an appropriate guide to what is beneficial or harmful. In this paper I argue that this conception of the role of the passions in Descartes is mistaken. First, in spite of a number of texts appearing to show the contrary, I argue that Descartes does not regard it as the role of the passions to inform us about what is beneficial or harmful. Second, although Descartes calls the passions good and useful, I argue that Descartes does not think we should allow ourselves to be guided by them. When we recognize that the function of the passions is largely motivational and not informative, we can more easily understand Descartes's practical advice in The Passions of the Soul that happiness requires us to guide our passions instead of letting our passions guide us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the reception of the Stoic theory of the passions in the early modern period, highlighting various differences between the way notions such as απαθεια (complete freedom from passions) and προπαθειαι (pre-passions) were handled and interpreted by Continental and English authors. Both groups were concerned about the compatibility of Stoicism with Christianity, but came to opposing conclu- sions; and while the Continental scholars drew primarily on ancient philosophical texts, the English ones relied, in addition, on experience and observation, developing a natural history of the passions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terence Penelhum has written extensively about the role of the idea of the self in Hume's account of the emotional and moral life of persons. Penelhum fails to notice, however, a change that takes place in the way that the idea of the self functions in Hume's account of the passions as that account evolved after the Treatise. This paper charts part of that evolution, and reflects on its significance for Hume's moral psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on Genesis 4:1-16 advances several reasons why Cain murdered Abel. The majority of commentators believe that Cain killed him because of anger, jealousy or envy. Some suggest that the murder is to be explained by Cain's depression. Those who believe that Cain was jealous of Abel often confuse jealousy with envy. Then there are those who oppose the idea that Cain killed Abel out of envy, and suggest that God was capricious to reject Cain's offering. The aim of this paper is to make sense of these divergent views. First, it establishes with whom Cain was angry and why he got depressed. The thesis is that Cain got angry at God and not Abel, and became depressed because he realised that he could not obtain what he desired (God's favour) on his own terms. It then clarifies the conceptual connection between envy, covetousness and jealousy, and argues that Cain murdered Abel because he envied, resented and hated him for his character and spiritual qualities, and because he lost honour and esteem. It concludes, in contrast to critics, that God was not capricious when he rejected Cain and his offering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treatments of sources of Adam Smith's sociological theory of the self and associated ideas inThe Theory of Moral Sentimentstypically refer to classical antecedents or the work of his teacher Francis Hutcheson or his contemporary David Hume. During the seventeenth century, however, many books on the passions were published in London that arguably constitute an important but neglected source of Smith's treatment of moral sentiments. These works are largely forgotten today but at the time were widely read. They are not philosophical, partly devotional and predominantly psychological. Although Smith does not refer to these works his argument resembles theirs in many places. The importance of the seventeenth-century books on the passions, apart from their role in the history of psychology, is their bearing on contemporary economic practices. In this paper the connections between Smith and one of these books, Thomas Wright'sThe Passions of the Minde in Generall, are indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An influential view of sexual morality claims that participant consent is sufficient for the moral permissibility of a sexual act. I argue that the complex and frequently dark nature of sexual desire precludes this, because some sexual desire has a character such that it should not be gratified, even if this were consented to. I illustrate this with a discussion of a famous literary character, the Vicomte de Valmont, and draw on Kant's anthropology to illuminate the nature of such desire, before offering an account of its psychological roots. In the course of the paper I explain why the view of sexual desire endorsed by my main opponents is mistaken, and attack the limited conception of the normative which is a central plank in the argument of a prominent recent defender of the view, Igor Primoratz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Discourse on Happiness is Émilie du Châtelet's most translated work, but there is no systematic interpretation of her account of the nature and means to happiness in the secondary literature. I argue that the key to understanding her account lies in interpreting the various roles of the "great machines of happiness." I show that Du Châtelet provides a sophisticated hedonistic account of the nature of happiness, in which passions and tastes are the means to self-perpetuating, increasing, and long-lasting sources of pleasure. In addition, I argue that the remaining "great machines of happiness" are not logically necessary conditions for happiness, but rather character traits that support our tastes and passions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kant's radical criticism of the passions has a central but largely overlooked moral-psychological component: for Kant, the passions promote a kind of self-deception he calls 'rationalizing'. In analysing the connection between passion and rationalizing self-deception, I identify and reconstruct two essential traits of Kant's conception of the passions. I argue (1) that rationalizing self-deception, according to Kant, contributes massively to the emergence and consolidation of passions. It aims to resolve a psychological conflict between passion and moral duty when in fact, it does not resolve but perpetuates this conflict. I then argue (2) that rationalizing does not necessarily aim to devalue moral duty, as Kant seems to suggest in the Groundwork. It can also aim to revalue the 'counterweight'. By analysing Kant's presentation of several individual passions in the Anthropology, I demonstrate that rationalizing here is concerned with elevating these passions and making them pass as morally (or at least prudentially) justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current rise of populism is often associated with affects. However, the exact relationship between populism and affects is unclear. This article addresses the question of what is distinctive about populist (appeals to) affects. It does so against the backdrop of a Laclauian conception of populism as a political logic that appeals to a morally laden frontier between two homogenous groups, 'the people' and 'those in power', in order to establish a new hegemonic order. I argue that it is distinctive of populism that it breaks with the dominating feeling rules by overtly appealing to affects and reclaiming them for the realm of the political. The article explores three groups of affective phenomena: discontent, anger, and fear; empathetic, sympathetic, group-based, and shared emotions; and collective passions of enthusiasm and love. It shows how an appeal to these affects relates to the political logic of populism itself by contributing to the concretization, collectivization, and unification of affects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]